Sensors, such as camera sensors utilized in electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablets, personal media players, and the like comprise arrays of sensor elements, or pixels, arranged in two dimensions in order to obtain a two-dimensional image of a scene. In traditional video capture, multiple images, or “frames” of video, are captured sequentially at a fixed resolution. In such instances, the camera sensor is sampled at a fixed frame rate (e.g., 30 frames per second). This time-based sampling leads to redundancy in captured information because, most typically, relatively few pixel values change from one frame to the next. This leads to power inefficiency, which can be especially burdensome for battery-powered devices.
Event-based cameras, such as a dynamic vision sensor (DVS), have been devised to address some of this inefficiency by communicating events only for those pixels with values (e.g., voltage levels) that have changed beyond a threshold amount. While event-based cameras have been intended to solve the power issue with frame-based camera sensors, these still can consume power if events occur quickly and can sometimes capture events at a speed greater than is useful for certain applications.